ABSTRACT
This chapter, written in the spring of 1989, presents a brief and inevitably dated appreciation of the parallel and related CDE and MBFR/CFE arms control processes.2 Although the chapter includes a relatively straightforward history of the two processes (a more recent history of CFE and CDE is covered in Chapter 11), concentrating on their origins, it also includes something more: a particular view of what has been important – and what will continue to be important – in the overall CDE/MBFR/CFE arms control process. This view grows out of a somewhat unorthodox appreciation of what it is that fundamentally animates the CDE and the CFE arms control processes. That particular view revolves around the claim that the two arms control processes possess substantial confidence-building characteristics. Further, this view argues that the success of the two arms control processes and their agreements are to be measured, at least in large part, in terms of their joint confidencebuilding impact.3
